The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  This was in late 2002. Samantha and I rarely talked during the first few months of 2003. Then I made an unexpected discovery. There was one person who knew the identity of Donor Coral for sure: Julianna McKillop, who had managed the Repository in the mid-1980s and had accidentally given away Coral’s first name when Samantha had visited the bank in 1985. When Samantha had started her hunt for Coral, she had tried and failed to locate Julianna, figuring that Julianna might be willing to call Coral for her. I, too, had searched for Julianna a little bit in 2001. But the letter I had sent her had been returned, and the phone number I had for her had been disconnected. I stopped looking for her; later, another donor told me she had died.

  In 2002 and 2003, I was helping a Canadian documentary company make a film about the Nobel sperm bank. In spring 2003, the film’s researcher, Derek Anderson, started looking for Julianna in the hope that she could find another donor Derek was looking for. Derek traced Julianna’s movements—from the old address in California that I had for her to Europe and back again—and finally found her. She was very much alive, and living in San Francisco.

  Derek gave me her phone number, and I called her. Julianna was delighted to be found. The Repository was the greatest adventure of her life, and she loved talking about it. We chatted for a bit about Robert Graham. Then, before I even mentioned why I was calling, she asked if I knew Donor Coral. He had been her favorite donor, she said. She had lost track of him when she’d left the Repository. She had always wondered what happened to him. “Oh, he was wonderful. I loved him. He was such a lovely man. Do you know what he’s doing now? I’d love to see him again. We were so close. We were such great friends.”

  I said I was looking for Coral, too. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. She didn’t want to reveal a confidence, so she wanted to make sure I wasn’t lying to weasel information out of her. To convince her of my good intentions, I told her about Samantha and Alton, and Samantha’s avid search. Julianna remembered Samantha, she was excited to aid Samantha’s quest. Julianna asked me if I knew Coral’s name. I said it was Jeremy, and that he was a doctor in Florida. That mollified her. She realized I was telling the truth. She asked if I knew Coral’s last name. It was Taft, I said.

  For a moment there was silence at her end of the line. She was considering whether to tell me the truth. Then she exclaimed, “That’s not it!”

  “It’s not?”

  “No, it’s Jeremy Sampson, unless he changed it. Sampson is the name he always used with me. Yes, Jeremy Sampson, not Taft. Oh, how I would love to see him again. We must find him! How can we find him?”

  Jeremy Sampson, not Jeremy Taft. The plastic surgeon hadn’t been lying; he had been the victim of a very unlikely series of coincidences.

  Julianna said she had always thought of herself as a “middle mom” when she was at the Repository—the apex of a triangular family consisting of the birth mother, the donor, and herself. She relished the prospect of middlemoming again. We agreed to search together for Dr. Jeremy Sampson in hope of reuniting him with Samantha, his son Alton, and Julianna.

  I arranged to see Julianna in San Francisco and met her one Saturday morning in her beautiful downtown apartment. She managed the building and lived there rent-free. One of Julianna’s many careers was as a painter, and she had decorated one wall of the dining room with a huge mural of her family. Practically every piece of furniture was painted in tempera—cheery, psychedelic patterns: I half expected her little dogs to be covered in swirls and paisley.

  Julianna had gotten a raw deal from life but vigorously resisted self-pity: she had lost a daughter to cancer, one husband to a plane crash, another to illness. She was in her sixties, but carried herself with the energy of a younger woman; in the bathroom there was a recent photo of her skydiving. She had white hair and a too-deep tan, and a little Liz Taylor in her face. She reminded me, in fact, of a beloved, aging movie star, at once effusive and imperial.

  I asked her how she had come to the Repository. “In 1981, I was a widow, I had just moved to La Jolla, and I went to a talk by [Graham’s assistant] Paul Smith at the Unitarian Church in Del Mar. Paul was running the Repository at the time. I heard him and I thought, That is the most fabulous idea I have ever heard. I asked if I could work for him, and he said, ‘Sure, I need someone to answer the phones.’ ” While Paul recruited donors and processed sperm, Julianna talked to the desperate customers who called asking for help.

  Paul Smith and Julianna were a mismatched set. She thought he was slovenly and careless. His record keeping was not up to her standards, and he shed dog hair everywhere. (“I told Paul, ‘Imagine if anyone gets infected because they are inserting dog hair in their uterus!’ ”) In 1984, she said, she convinced Robert Graham to fire Smith. Unfortunately for the Repository, the donors, who had all been recruited by Paul, left with him.

  Paul Smith remained a fervent devotee of genius sperm banking after Graham sacked him. He took the Repository donors and opened a rival sperm bank, Heredity Choice, which is still going today. Heredity Choice has fathered nearly three hundred kids, according to Paul, more than the Repository ever did.

  Today, Paul runs Heredity Choice out of love (or obsession)—God knows there is no rational reason to do it. He and his delightful wife, Adonna, own ten acres in the California desert, way out in the Antelope Valley, where they breed border collies, Siberian huskies, and genius babies. They make a teeny bit of money from selling sperm and puppies. They spend it on dog food and collecting sperm.

  When I met him in 2001, Paul was still recovering from an embarrassing setback. The last time he had let a reporter come to his home was in 1996, when a Primetime Live camera crew filmed him for a story about genius sperm banks. Paul kept his Heredity Choice samples in a trailer that had no running water. That was unsanitary enough. But Paul also showed the crew his liquid-nitrogen tanks, where he stored human sperm and dog sperm side by side. Paul didn’t understand why this was revolting. When ABC reporter Cynthia McFadden asked him about mingling the human and dog samples, Paul gave a funny, self-destructive answer: “The dog straws are twice as long [as the human ones]. I don’t think I have ever confused the two. And none of my clients has ever had puppies from the sperm I have supplied.”

  California public health officials were understandably less jolly. They inspected Heredity Choice a few weeks after the camera crew’s visit and ordered Paul to shut down—the only time California had ever closed a sperm bank. Paul squabbled with them a little bit, then moved his storage tanks to Nevada, which didn’t regulate sperm banks.* 4

  With Paul out of the way, Julianna convinced Graham to make her the manager instead. Julianna relished her new job. “I said, ‘I am going to collect sperm come hell or high water.’ ” She cruised southern California in a white Pontiac Grand Am, searching for candidates. “I went to Caltech, and I started knocking on doors. I would say, ‘I am Julianna, do you have fifteen minutes?’ and he would say, ‘Who are you?’ And I would say, ‘I am from the Repository for Germinal Choice. Have you heard of it?’ And he would say, ‘Come in and shut the door!’ ” When a donor accepted, Julianna would whip out a cup and tell him she’d return in forty-five minutes to collect it. When she got the sperm, she rushed it out to the car and, in the middle of the Caltech campus, mixed in the buffer and froze the vials.

  Julianna shared Graham’s conviction that improving the gene pool was the most urgent job in the world. When FedEx spilled a Repository liquid-nitrogen tank, thawing and killing the sperm inside, Julianna built a special wooden stand to hold the tanks upright during shipment. “One drop of spilled sperm was like gold!”

  Eventually, she went so far for the cause that it got her fired. When a particularly desperate client failed to conceive with frozen sperm, Julianna suggested that her then boyfriend—a successful surgeon—contribute fresh semen, since fresh was more potent than frozen. The surgeon wasn’t a donor of the Repository and hadn’t been vetted by Graham and his board. And this was also after HIV had been ide
ntified. Julianna had been dating the surgeon for two years, so she vouched for his clean blood. That didn’t protect her when Graham’s wife, Marta Ve, heard about the proposed freelancing. Julianna was fired, though she said she would do the same thing again: helping a needy woman conceive was more important than an academic concern about a donor she knew to be clean and healthy.

  The story of her firing brought Julianna back to her favorite subject and mine: Donor Coral. Julianna said that she never gave the client fresh sperm from her boyfriend. Instead, she tried once more with frozen sperm. That time she used a Coral sample. It worked, because Coral never failed. “He always had so much sperm, and it was so active,” Julianna said. “And it is not just that there was so much of it, but they were all going in the right direction with one head and one tail. Jeremy’s were like a whole school of sardines!

  “Oh, Jeremy was wonderful. When Jeremy came along, that made the bank. We had almost no donors then, but he came, and he was so great, and I knew: now we can really have a sperm bank.”

  “How did you find him?” I asked.

  He had volunteered, Julianna said. It was around 1984. “He read about it and he came to see us. I said, ‘Tell us about yourself.’ His answers were so wonderful.” Jeremy wasn’t a Nobelist. He was just a medical student, too young to have accomplished much. But he seemed just the kind of all-around stud that Graham craved—the type of man Graham’s clients were so smitten with. He said he had an IQ of 160. He was gifted at chess and mathematics. He was a superb athlete. He came from a celebrated family of scientists and musicians. He was great-looking and incredibly charming. And he had already fathered three beautiful kids. “It was all so cool,” said Julianna. The board quickly approved him as a donor.

  Coral became the Repository’s star. Julianna urged applicants to select him. She did that not only because she had a plentiful supply of his seed—he was an avid donor—but also because she thought, “His genes should go all over the place.” Jeremy separated from his wife soon after he signed up for the bank, and Dr. Graham—keen to keep his prize stallion—told Julianna to make sure he was happy. She took him out to dinner on Graham’s dime and bought him bottles of wine. They struck up a great friendship. “He was such a freethinker, so creative, so caring. He reminded me of Dr. Graham, in fact.”

  The Repository produced about sixty kids while she was there, she said, and half of them were Jeremy’s. She had no doubt that Jeremy would want to meet his sons Alton and Tom. “Jeremy would want to see the whole family get together. He is a family man. He would love that.”

  I told Samantha about the discovery of Jeremy Sampson. She was overjoyed that the donor wasn’t the objectionable Jeremy Taft. In mid-June 2003, she and I began searching in earnest for Jeremy Sampson. Julianna left the hunt to us. Julianna couldn’t remember where Jeremy had worked or even where he had attended medical school. Still, we expected the search would be a cinch: How many Jeremy Sampsons had graduated from med school in California during the 1980s and then practiced in Florida? We examined Florida and California physician records, but there was no Jeremy, Jerry, Gerry, or Jeremiah Sampson. We found a Dr. Jeremiah Simpson, but he was way too old. I asked Julianna if she possibly misremembered the name. She doubted it, but we looked for other Jeremy Ss, anyway. I found a Jeremy Sanders who seemed promising, but Samantha saw a picture of him and knew it was the wrong guy. Samantha went to her local Mormon temple to check genealogy records. No Jeremy Sampson. She tried to cross-reference California’s marriage and physician records. No Jeremy Sampson.

  Samantha called medical schools in southern California. More dead ends. I proposed digging through California divorce records, since we knew Jeremy had split from his wife in the mid-1980s. Samantha considered hiring a research assistant to help us. We had mostly been searching online, but on a lark, I suggested that Samantha call the Medical Board of California and speak to a real person. Perhaps Jeremy Sampson had accidentally been dropped from the online directory.

  Samantha phoned me the next day. Jackpot. The clerk at the medical board had found Jeremy Sampson immediately. She gave Samantha a work phone number for Dr. Sampson in Florida, at the State Department of Epidemiology. “It’s great. It’s great. It’s great!” Samantha trilled to me on the phone. “This is amazing. This is him. It has got to be him. It’s him. My God, the probability of this happening is so slim. . . .”

  I asked her about the state agency he worked for. Samantha sounded a little dubious. “It doesn’t sound like something someone of his accomplishments would be doing.” Then she laughed at herself. “I have this dream, this idealized vision of what he is, and I know he can’t possibly live up to it.”

  Julianna and I had agreed that she would make the first contact with Jeremy. We didn’t want to spook him, which a call from me or Samantha surely would. I passed on Jeremy’s phone number to Julianna. While we waited for her to call, I did a little more research on Jeremy Sampson. Now that I knew who the right guy was, it was easy to track him in online databases. I turned up some troubling stuff. He was involved in several lawsuits. He had had some minor run-ins with the authorities.

  I didn’t tell Samantha about most of this; I didn’t want to alarm her. What little I did tell her bugged her, but not too much. She was eager to believe the best of him.

  She told her son that Donor Coral had been found. Alton was pleased but cautious, Samantha said. He didn’t know what to expect. He was curious about Jeremy’s family history, but he definitely didn’t want ‘some kind of weird relationship.’ ” And he definitely didn’t start talking about Jeremy Sampson as his “dad.”

  Samantha and Alton wondered how to approach Jeremy. They agreed that Alton should write a letter and send a picture. First, Alton agonized over how to address it: “Dear Coral” or “Dear Jeremy” or even “Dear Mr. Sampson.”

  Then he wondered what to write. “What the fuck do you say to someone like this? What do you say to him?” he asked his mom. They were both baffled. They were in a new world. There was no guidebook on how to meet your donor dad. “None of us has role models for this, it is unknown,” Samantha told me. “We are on the edge of human feelings.”

  By now, Julianna had called Jeremy Sampson, and he had returned her phone message. He had been “ecstatic,” Julianna reported, and wanted to know everything about Alton. He had offered to fly to Boston immediately, but Julianna had encouraged him to hold his horses. Julianna talked to Samantha and told her more about Jeremy. What Julianna said reassured Samantha. Jeremy and Alton were very similar, to go by Julianna’s description. “He reminds me of my son in so many ways,” Samantha told me after her conversation with Julianna. According to Julianna, Samantha said, “Jeremy is independent and creative. He does not care about what others think about him. He is often quiet and thoughtful and likes to assess a situation before he speaks.” Samantha and I debated about whether we should also tell Tom that we had found his father. We decided to wait a little more. We thought we should let Jeremy adjust to one new son before springing a second son—and a grandson—on him.

  In early July, a week after we found him, Jeremy called Samantha at home. They talked for almost two hours. Jeremy was fascinated with Alton. He asked lots of questions. The parallels between Alton and Jeremy’s relatives flabbergasted Samantha. Alton played piano; Jeremy’s mother had been a professional pianist. Alton was an aspiring marine biologist; Jeremy’s father and grandfather were both celebrated marine biologists. Alton got on the phone for a few minutes, too. He and Jeremy compared likes and dislikes. Jeremy liked chess; so did Alton. Jeremy loved bike riding; Alton, too. They both preferred Russian composers to Germans. They exchanged photos by e-mail right afterward: they looked a lot alike, and Jeremy swore that Alton was a dead ringer for himself at sixteen. They made plans for Jeremy to fly up to Boston in August.

  Samantha gave me the download the next day. “At the end of our telephone conversation, he referred to ‘our boy.’ I loved that. I never never never thought I
would hear that expression.”

  Samantha was happy and stunned. Alton was dumbfounded. He told Samantha that it was “too much to grok.” He wondered what in his life belonged just to him and what was programmed into his DNA. Marine biology—maybe that was a coincidence. But what about marine biology plus piano plus chess plus bikes plus Rachmaninoff? Alton posted cryptic notes on his blog. One began, “WhatamI?”

  Samantha and Julianna kept me away from Jeremy. He didn’t want to talk to a reporter yet. I wrote him a note through Samantha, assuring him that I wouldn’t reveal his identity. Finally he wrote me back a letter and an e-mail. He said he was happy to talk to me. We made a phone date. From the moment he started speaking, I got curious vibes off Jeremy. He was undeniably sweet and friendly. He was admirably curious about his sperm bank kids. But his manner was vague and his conversation meandering.

  I asked him about himself. He told me he had wanted a big family ever since he was a teenager. “Some people want fame and fortune. I wanted a lot of kids.” Then he told me how many kids he had—just by his wives and girlfriends, not counting sperm banks: “about X kids with Y different women” was how he put it. To protect his identity, I can’t reveal what X and Y were, but suffice it to say that X was an extremely high number, and Y wasn’t small, either.

  Jeremy had also been an avid sperm donor, he said. He had contributed to the Repository and two other banks. He was interested in meeting all of his sperm bank children. (In his letter to me, he had written, “Even a crocodile takes an interest in recognizing and protecting its offspring. Shouldn’t a human being be interested in doing more than this?”) He said he had stopped donating to sperm banks only because he had gotten distracted by real women. “I was involved with two women at the same time. There was not a lot of sperm left over.”